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What is a Site in Lync Server?

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Are Lync Server sites related to Active Directory sites? How can I get a list of my Lync Server sites? And how do I create a site policy?

Wow, so many questions! Let's see what we can do to answer them:

1. Are Lync Server sites related to Active Directory sites? No, they are not. Oh, and Lync Server sites are not related to Microsoft Exchange sites, either. Lync Server sites are specific to Lync Server.

To quote from the Lync Server PowerShell help, Lync Server sites are" … typically organized according to geography and network bandwidth. For example, if all your computers in Redmond are located on the same local area network with high-speed, low-latency connections, you might designate a Redmond site that encompasses those computers. If your computers in Dublin are located on their own local area network, and share high-speed, low-latency connections, then you might create a separate Dublin site as well. Sites play a key role in Lync Server management: most policies and settings can be configured at the site scope, making it easy to do such things as apply one set of dial plans to users in Redmond and a completely different set of dial plans to users in Dublin."

You'll always have at least one site in your Lync Server deployment; whether or not you have additional sites will depend on such things as the number of users you have, the number of locations you have, and the speed and reliability of the network connections between those locations.

In other words, way too big of a story for us to tell here.

2. How can I get a list of my Lync Server sites? That's an easy one; after all, that's what the Get-CsSite cmdlet is for. If you want information about all your sites all you need to do is run this command:

Get-CsSite

Or, to get back information for just one of your sites, use a command like this:

Get-CsSite –Identity "Redmond"

3. How do I create a site policy? Believe it or not, the same way you create any policy. Depending on the type of policy you're working with, policies can be configured at the site scope, the service scope, or the per-user scope. (You can, and will, also have policies at the global scope, but those have been pre-created for you and you can’t create any new ones at that scope. However, you canmodify these global policies any time you want.)

So how do you create a site policy vs. a service policy vs. a per-user policy? The difference between the policy types lies in the Identity you give that new policy. For example, to create a new per-user policy you basically just give the policy a name (it's not really a name, but you'll get the idea):

New-CsExternalAccessPolicy –Identity "RedmondExternalAccess"

To create a new policy at the service scope (something you'll rarely do, because most policies can't be created at the service scope) you need to use the service ID as the policy Identity:

New-CsClientVersionPolicy -Identity "Registrar:atl-cs-001.litwareinc.com"

Last, but certainly not least, you create a site policy by setting the Identity to the prefix site: followed by the name of the site:

New-CsVoicePolicy –Identity "site:Redmond"

We should mention that you don't have to assign service- or site-scoped policies to the service or site; they are automatically assigned based on their Identity. For example, as soon the preceding command finishes, you'll have a new voice policy assigned to the Redmond site. For more information, see the article Assigning Policies.